May 5, 2017

I just saw the new TV show entitled “Mississippi”

A TV show with the title “Mississippi” has been heavily advertised for several days. I was really looking forward to seeing this show today because I though it was going to be about the 3,000 German soldiers who were captured during combat in World War II and were then sent to a POW camp in Mississippi.

I thought that the main theme of the show would be that the German soldiers acted badly. Bad Germans!

At this point, I have to tell you that, during World War II, captured German soldiers were sent to my home town to dig ditches along the railroad tracks. My house was only a few feet from the railroad tracks, so these German soldiers were working within a few feet of my house.

I was 12 years old at that time, and I didn’t know anything about the German people. I was completely and totally shocked when I found out that all these men could speak perfect English, and they were all very handsome. Why did America go to war against people like this, I wondered.

Later, when I was living in Germany, after World War II, while my husband was an army officer, I talked to some German men who had been POWs in America. They said that they had been served “pig food” in an American POW camp. They explained that they had been served corn on the cob, and they had to eat it with their hands. They claimed that they had been humiliated by this.

But, to get back to the TV show, it turns out that this was a show about buttons from military uniforms that were found in a former POW camp in Mississippi. This was not what I was expecting. The men in the show were acting very excited about finding some old rusty buttons. Big Deal!

That would have been VERY peculiar at that time. You must have had Prussian POWs. It was more common for them to know English. And even today, they are the only ones that can “speak perfect English”. The southern areas, such as Austria, speak a broken English even today.

Arnold Schwarzenegger would be about the best English you’d get from the Southern Germans. The English Crown areas might have taught a proper English at the time. Herbert Stolpmann probably has excellent insight into this matter – being from the Prussian areas IIRC. Which Germans were generally taught English at the time, Herbert, and could speak it as well as a native speaker?

You wrote: “Was there nothing about God’s little darlings in the TV-show?”

When you say “God’s little darlings” do you mean God’s Chosen People?

The TV show entitled Mississippi was about finding military buttons in a location that was formerly a Prisoner of War camp. The show was not about Jews. It was about finding buttons from the uniforms of German soldiers who were Prisoners of War.